Re: Request to elevate: Success Criterion 1.4.7 Low or No Background Audio

On 04/08/2020 13:39, Sailesh Panchang wrote:
> Hi Patrick,
> The ease / difficulty of testing is not the primary motivation for the
> WCAG requirements, no?

Of course not, but from a practical point of view, there's no point 
defining SCs if it'll be difficult or impossible for auditors to 
actually test them, I'd say. Unless a lot of work goes into explaining 
(in the understanding document?) how auditors are supposed to actually 
perform a test against this sort of SC...it'll be useless at worst, or 
at best lead to very widely disparate results.

> On the spot live captioning is also fraught with  challenges, yet it
> is a Level AA SC.

Slightly different though...you can test even before the live event 
actually happens that at the very least the technical bits required for 
having live captions is there (there's a "CC" button, you can ask the 
client if they actually have it set up so that their live events do have 
somebody actually piping in the captions, etc). Yes, I presume that in 
the end it's still possible for all the technical bits to be in place, 
but a live event then simply not taking advantage of them / not sending 
captions when they should. For audio levels, this feels even more 
volatile though, as there's even less that you could check "in principle".
> It appears to me that you do agree that this could be a vexing
> accessibility issue for  several users across more than one PWD group
> in today's world.

Yup, never disputed that part.

> So revisiting SC 1.4.7 may not be a bad idea.
> Elevating it as is to Level AA should perhaps be tabled for
> consideration.
> Live content could be considered separately.
> True, how-to-test will surely need to be figured out.

And yes, while not the primary concern of course, note that this 
immediately makes every audit (to AA level) more complex/time consuming 
for auditors to perform (by a factor that is directly related to the 
length of audio, or multimedia with audio, material present in the 
sample that is being evaluated).

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Tuesday, 4 August 2020 13:42:24 UTC